Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun

172 Pages·1997·3.47 MB·English

by  Richard Feynman

Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by David L. Goodstein and Judith R. Goodstein
Dedication
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
1
From Copernicus to Newton
2
Feynman: A Reminiscence
3
Feynman’s Proof of the Law of Ellipses
4
“The Motion of Planets Around the Sun” (MARCH 13, 1964)
Epilogue
Feynman’s Lecture Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
On 14 March 1964 Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of
the 20th Century, delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Motion of the Planets Around
the Sun’. For thirty years this remarkable lecture was believed to be lost. But
now Feynman’s work has been reconstructed and explained in meticulous,
accessible detail, together with a history of ideas of the planets’ motions. The
result is a vital and absorbing account of one of the fundamental puzzles of
science, and an invaluable insight into Feynman’s charismatic brilliance.
About the Authors
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, the late Richard Feynman taught for
many years at the California Institute of Technology. He is best known to a wide
readership as the author of Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! and What Do
You Care What Other People Think.
Dr. David Goodstein is Vice Provost and Professor of Physics at the California
Institute of Technology. Dr. Judith Goldstein, registrar and archivist at Caltech,
is author of Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of
Technology.
BY DAVID L. GOODSTEIN
The Mechanical Universe and Beyond
(PBS television series)
States of Matter
BY JUDITH R. GOODSTEIN
Millikan’s School
To the memory of R.P.F.,
who would be appalled that we found it
necessary to explain what he had
said so clearly.

Preface
This is the story of how Feynman’s lost lecture came to be lost, and how it came
to be found again. In April 1992, as Caltech’s archivist, I was asked by Gerry
Neugebauer, the chairman of the Physics Department, to go through the files in
Robert Leighton’s office. Leighton was ill and had not used his office for several
years. Marge Leighton, his wife, had told Neugebauer that it was all right to
clean out the office—she’d already collected her husband’s books and personal
effects. I could take what I wanted for the archives, and the Physics Department
would dispose of the rest.
Besides heading the Physics Department from 1970 to 1975, Leighton,
together with Matthew Sands, had overseen the editing and publication of
Richard Feynman’s two-year course of lectures in introductory physics,
delivered to Caltech freshmen and sophomores. The lectures, published in the
early 1960s in three volumes by Addison-Wesley, dealt with virtually every
subject in physics, with a point of view that remains fresh and original to this
day. I was hoping to find some tangible evidence of the Leighton-Feynman
collaboration.
It took me a couple of weeks to sift through the stacks of paper, which were
stashed everywhere, but Leighton didn’t disappoint me. I unearthed two folders,
one marked “Feynman Freshman Lectures, unfinished,” another labeled
“Addison-Wesley,” wedged between budget sheets and purchase orders from
earlier decades and reams of yellowing computer paper covered with endless
columns of numbers, all thrown together in a storage closet just outside his
office. Leighton’s correspondence with the publisher contained details about the
format, the color of the cover, comments by outside readers, adoptions at other
schools, and estimates of how well the volumes would sell. That folder I put in
the “Save” pile. The other folder, the one containing the unedited Feynman
physics lectures, I carried back to the archives myself.
In his June 1963 preface to The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Feynman
commented on some of the lectures not included there. He’d given three optional
lectures in the first year on how to solve problems. And, indeed, three of the
items in Leighton’s folder turned out to be the raw transcripts for Reviews A, B,
and C, offered by Feynman in December 1961. A lecture on inertial guidance,
which Feynman gave the following month, didn’t make the cut either—an
unfortunate decision, according to Feynman—and I found a partial transcript of
this lecture in Leighton’s folder. The folder also contained the unedited partial
transcript of a later lecture, dated March 13, 1964, along with a sheaf of notes in
Feynman’s handwriting. Entitled “The Motion of Planets Around the Sun,” it
was an unorthodox approach to Isaac Newton’s geometric demonstration of the
law of ellipses, in the Principia Mathematica.
In September 1993, I had occasion to draw up a list of the original
audiotapes of the Feynman lectures, which had also been contributed to the
archives. They included five lectures that were not to be found in the Addison-
Wesley books. Then I remembered the five unpublished lectures in Leighton’s
file; sure enough, the unedited transcripts matched the tapes. The archives also
had photographs of the blackboard diagrams and equations for four of these
lectures—the four mentioned by Feynman in his preface—but I could find none
for the March 1964 lecture on planetary motion. (In the course of selecting
illustrations for this book, I did stumble upon one photograph of Feynman taken
during this special lecture. It is reproduced here as the frontispiece.) Although
Feynman had given Leighton his notes on the 1964 lecture, which included
sketches of his blackboard drawings, Leighton apparently decided not to include
it in the last (1965) volume of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which dealt
primarily with quantum mechanics. In time, this lecture was forgotten. For all
practical purposes, it was lost.
The idea of rescuing all five unpublished Feynman lectures from oblivion
appealed to David and me. So the following December, when we went, as we
often do, to the Italian hill town of Frascati, we took along copies of the tapes,
the transcripts, the blackboard photographs, and Feynman’s notes. In the course
of the next two weeks, we listened to the tapes, took notes, laughed at the jokes,
strained to hear the students’ questions and Feynman’s answers after each
lecture was over, took more notes. But in the end, we decided that the only
lecture that still had the vitality, originality, and verve we associated with
Feynman’s presence in the classroom was the 1964 lecture on planetary motion
—the one lecture that demanded a full complement of blackboard photographs.
And we didn’t have them. Reluctantly, we abandoned the project.